There is a notebook on my shelf holding the names of all the people I’ve ever kissed, and with whom I’ve had sex, sometimes with a date and a location annotated. The list has grown more elaborate with each encounter, and with what I’ve meant by “fucking”.

Like the first time I intertwined my fingers with a boy, in the back of a car driving me home late at night. I met him a few hours earlier because my aunt, who had to look after me that evening, also wanted to go to a concert with her best friend: this boy’s mom. There was a birthday party that I’d been brought to, as a present for a woman I had made out with some months earlier. The woman opened her front door with a theatrical announcement of my function. Then—without a word—she walked me to her bathroom, where I shoved us in a cramped corner and made her come with my hand. Flipping through the pages of that journal, as I thought about writing this, I’ve realized that each of these stories starts with a name.

In the summer of last year, I approached Hotel Zoo Berlin about offering me a room for a night. I had an idea for an evening series conversations between strangers, but I did not have a name for it yet.

There were things I had been thinking. These thoughts boiled in me. The agitation kept my mind spiraling in and out of ambivalence. There was sensuality and anger. I wanted to be loud about it, and not only to myself. I wanted this to be loud, I desired to watch thunderstorms pounds inside me, as watching the Perseids with very close friends pounds in my memory.

Too many topics had the urgency of shouts. The heavily-mediated discharge of Harvey Weinstein’s horrors, and before him, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And behind these, the immortal and unjudged lineage of power and its abuse. I wanted to talk about coercion in the art world, harassment in the U-Bahn, online surveillance - but I also wanted safe alliances: intersectionality, ambiguous resistance, killjoy ideals, femme perseverance, and sex that spat in the eye of patriarchal hegemony.

I did not have a name for this. I knew that it would have to take place in a luxurious hotel room. Over the years, I’d instigated many enterprises, certain endeavors, more amorous than others simply chasing a free night in a place I most likely would never afford.

As I was feeling for the thread of the first event, I came across a review by Alison Hugill in MOMUS, of the cruising pavilion presented during the 16th Architecture Biennale in Venice.

In this essay, she notes that despite the curators’ —Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault, and Charles Teyssou— resistance to the notion that cruising sites are only for men or homosexuals, the artworks in the pavilion present few instances of women and non-male-identified queers actively making use of cruising spots. She also proposes that networked apps (e.g., Grindr, Tinder, or FetLife), have become equivalent to cruising spots in their promise of random sexual encounters.

Now, how do I make Google learn that when I type “femme cruising” I am not looking for overpriced mass-travel by ship?

On September 30th, my venting collaborators were Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Selin Davasse, Nat Marcus, Jay Owens, and Maria Ines Plaza Lazo. They were artists, poets, academics, performers. Some of them I had met before, others I only knew online. They were femme-identified, they were allies. Along with another twenty guests, we met in a diva’s hotel room, with a view to the Kudamm, a king-size bed, dark green velvet armchairs, a clawfoot tub, and dozens of pillows.

I had found a name for the evening, Precarious Gossips. As we sipped tea and wine, we’d have an entire night to discuss the reasons some of us abstained, voluntarily or otherwise, from cruising. Shared some of the strategies (online and off) we found persuasive in our drift towards less normative rendezvous.

When I think about this, I think about permission and I think about dirt.

In French, a public man is the illustrious body of the social contract. He can be a governmental body, he could be Brett Kavanaugh. In French, a public woman is a whore, or else a film by Andrzej Żuławski from 1984.

The establishment of public space found its language as it escorted certain members of society away from it. The children, the demented, the perverted, and the women. Non-male bodies were, for a long time, confined to clean, interior, or private spaces— the home, the laundry house, the salon, and the hotel room.

I grew up in a white, hetero middle-class house. The house was inside a village in the middle of France. For a long time, I was a child, and still remain a non-male body.

Did the Mӕnads give me the first silhouette of a cruising femme? They were reported to have performed miracles, after all. They were also insane, intoxicated, and loudly roamed the earth, unconfined to domestic grounds.

For a long time I didn’t feel much autonomy in my body (sometimes I still don’t).

For a long time, my idea of an autonomous body was called Genet, LaBruce, Waters, or Wojnarowicz. They always seemed to be frolicking in a bathhouse the size of an ocean. Eventually, my frustration boiled it all down to a dick soup stirred by interchangeable Catherines—or else a bunch of institutionally debauched privileged, white cis-women named Millet, Deneuve, or Breillat.

As if I had been agreeing with Hegel that women are the eternal irony of the community. Instead of this, let me lip-sync to Preciado: the new feminists, we who do not need a husband because we are not women.

If the canon is rotten, find the dirt to grow your own garden. This is a terribly seductive idea. But seen from the dirt whereon I stand, the earth is either owned by men and covered in concrete, or is owned by men and burns.

A friend had asked me earlier, “What is the feeling you have when you cannot sleep and there is a restlessness in your calves and thighs and you must walk at night?”

One of the most enduring narratives that insists non-male bodies be kept inside is the one that says the world outside is not safe. This is a narrative that endures despite what we all know to be true, despite the silence created by this narrative wrapped across our mouths. We say that the outside world is not safe even as we know from notes recorded on our own bodies that the family structure breeds the great majority of sexual violence on earth.

"If your life is meaningless. Why don't you masturbate?" reads a meme I find on another friend’s Twitter feed.

The question is obviously gendered but the meme remains coy.

I’ll answer anyway. I want real possibilities of agency against social expectations. I want a free sexuality without the pharmaceutical surveillance of The Pill. I want out of coupling as humanity’s collective bargaining unit. I want safety in the sense of care, not safety as grown in the bourgeoisie. I want consensual promiscuity as I lick the evening dew off of the screen of her phone. I want incestuous orgies, I want the tenderness of pilosity, the rage of hormonal hacking, the ennui of anal orgasms passing through my cheek and into the wall of another disaffected train station. I want fucking to rain hammer blows onto Google’s idea of sexual intercourse, for the penis/vagina binary to split forever. I want fucking to mean stroking, sucking, licking, pushing, licking, kissing, touching, smelling, sweating, feeling, breathing. I want to put my trust in white-cis-men whom I don’t want to fuck. I want intimacy without the burden of a name.

I would go on, but instead I will only quote from a series of answers Jesse Darling received after asking a question in an Instagram Story: if there is a point to anything, it lies in conversations, intimacy, and revenge.

is based in Berlin.
She has a conceptual and interdisciplinary practice that includes the production of images, writing, performance, online gestures, filmmaking, discussions and installation. Concerned with social systems, representation and technology, she develops obsessive rituals, collaborations and speculative narratives to question these issues.
Last year, Sans initiated the series of conversations in hotel rooms called Precarious Gossips. These aim at gathering voices coming from multiple backgrounds, that may be under-represented or generally more quiet, as to discuss important yet delicate topics.

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